Perfectly Crafted Tweet Secrets

I’ve been known to use the phrase myself when attempting to help my children communicate without yelling and screaming at each other. Don’t ask me whether it’s working, they’re siblings after all!

Communication can be tricky at the best of times. The choice of words is very important in any medium. On the Internet, even more so because the written word is so much more open to misinterpretation.

So how do you craft a good twitter message? Consider…

Length: Short and sweet is best – if you can keep it to around 5 words you’re doing well. Try to keep the message so a Form 2 secondary school student could read it. And yes, there is ultimately a limit of 140 characters (including spaces)

Question vs Message: Messages get about half the clicks of a good question

Exclamation marks: Enthusiastic posts using “!” get 27% more clicks. But use wisely, you can’t make something really boring more interesting with just a piece of punctuation. Work on the message instead.

Hashtags – Lots less clicks (82%) when messaging consumers. Not recommended for messaging the general public.

Hottest RT item: Good old fashioned quotes. Carefully woven into a blog post, quotes are a great way to encourage followers to click through to your website.

As with all “rules” about tweeting, these are great guidelines to start from. Get to know your audience and test, test test!